Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Chapter 10

Key Facts

1.

It
is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing
intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be
dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything
is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is,
except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to
say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

Kurt Vonnegut, as the narrator, addresses
his publisher Seymour (“Sam”) Lawrence directly in this passage
from Chapter 1. He seems to apologize for
delivering such a short, fragmented manuscript. The irony of this
passage is that if there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,
then writing a book about one, no matter how short, is a major accomplishment.
Perhaps like birdsong, the book merely serves as a simple communication
demonstrating that life still exists in a devastated world. The
bird’s inquisitive refrain returns in the very last line of the
novel, leaving us with the unanswered question of what life is like
in the aftermath of war—life’s most devastating enemy.

2.

Billy
had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method
for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living.
A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy’s wall told him that
it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: “God grant
me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to
change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.” Among
the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present,
and the future.

This passage occurs in Chapter 3,
after Billy has been kidnapped and taken to Tralfamadore in 1968.
There he sees the same inscription on a locket around the neck of
Montana Wildhack, the actress brought to mate with Billy in the
Tralfamadorian zoo. The saying brings to light the central conflict
of Billy’s attempt to live a Tralfamadorian life in a human world:
he subscribes to the Tralfamadorian belief that there is a fourth
dimension of time and that time is cyclical, but he lives in a world
in which everyone believes that time moves in a single, linear progression.
Tralfamadorians would argue that humans never know the difference
between the things they cannot change because there is no difference;
nothing is negotiable in a universe of predefined, structured moments.

3.

Billy
answered. There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost
smell his breath—mustard gas and roses. It was a wrong number. Billy
hung up.

In Chapter 4,
the night after his daughter’s wedding in 1967,
Billy gets up out of bed, unable to sleep. He knows that the flying
saucer will come for him soon. He wanders into his daughter’s empty
bedroom, the phone rings, and on the other end is a drunk. It is
unusual that Billy claims he can almost to smell the mustard gas
and roses on his breath over the phone. This detail emerges through
a kind of empathy that seems to connect otherwise unrelated moments
in the omniscient narration. We, the readers, recognize this drunk
from Chapter 1: he is the author, Kurt Vonnegut,
who in his middle age has a tendency to make drunken phone calls
late at night to old girlfriends, his breath stinking of mustard
gas and roses. The odd combination of mustard gas, often used as
a chemical weapon, and roses, a symbol of romance, highlights how
deeply the war has affected Vonnegut’s life.

4.

“If
I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian,
“I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited
thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied
reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of
free will.”

This quotation comes at the end of Chapter 4,
as Billy listens to his captors describe the true nature of time.
These words reveal that not only do Tralfamadorians have a completely
deterministic view of the universe in which every moment is structured
beyond the control of its participants, but that they also lack
an awareness of the possibility of free will. The alien who talks
to Billy is an exception, having encountered the peculiarly human
hang-up in his travels. But he maintains that humans, alone among
all beings in the universe, believe in the illusion of free will.
His emphasis on the idea of “studying” humans and inhabitants of
other planets makes humans (and their conception of free will) and
other non--Tralfamadorians seem like bizarre exceptions to the rule
of nature. He thus performs a reversal of the human tendency to
think of alien life as abnormal.

5.

There
isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that
the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at
once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising
and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense,
no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the
depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

In this passage at the beginning of
Chapter 5, one of Billy’s captors explains
the Tralfamadorian novel to him. It seems that Vonnegut has taken
this template as a model for Slaughterhouse-Five, down
to the rows of asterisks or dots separating short clumps of text.
The irony of such a strategy is that Vonnegut, like Billy, lacks
the Tralfamadorian ability to pick and choose his moments. Vonnegut
thus considers his book a failure of sorts, because he has achieved
the Tralfamadorian structure without its accompanying depth and beauty,
and because he has come up with nothing more intelligent or deep
to say about a massacre than “Poo-tee-weet.” Most
readers would argue, however, that Vonnegut has actually succeeded
in making a thing of great beauty out of a collection of tragic
moments.

Some things that are significant about this book (in my view) that were not mentioned in the SparkNote are this:
Billy Pilgrim's last name
A religious connection in the book
The colour of his feet again
As to the first, I think that since 'Billy' was obviously chosen with care, 'Pilgrim' was too. Pilgrim could refer to his otherworldly journey through time, although it's uncertain what he would be making a pilgrimage too - possibly death. Or, it could just be his journey through the war.
As to the religious impl... Read more→

I think that BIlly Pilgrim's journeys through time could instead be a social commentary on Post-Traumatic Stress disorder. Billy isn't skipping through time, instead he's an old man sitting at his home, his daughter is taking care of him, and when he closes his eyes he suffers his wartime flashbacks and delusions about traveling through space in which he lives in a dream with elements from his life, like how Montana Wildhack was the Porn Star from the book store that Billy visited to see the Kilgore Trout novels. It also explains why the boo